Naomi Campbell - Vivienne Westwood - Fall/Winter 1993/1994

It’s a matter of seconds: one foot wrong, an unsteady heel, balance is lost and the model is falling down/on the runway, falling down/falling down my fair lady. We’ve seen it three times at the Fashion for Relief, the fashion show held in Cannes in support of Japan and we see it all the time on runways all over the world. Disaster? Catastrophe? Where is it all going to end, at this -literal- pace, my friend? Some people really think that way.

A model that falls down is not a "serious professional" (music from a string orchestra rising in the background) from whom we would expect a flawless catwalk that –if feasible- would have to be walked on in a state of semi-levitation. Because fashion is like a machine, and like in a machine its mechanisms must be made of metal: cold, non-human, functional. Yet… yet when a model falls down people smile, cheer, feel sympathetic. The same " serious professional " after tumbling down so obviously does not leave in tears, like a Russian ice-skater that has missed a double Axel at the times of the iron curtain, but smiles, gives a wink and claps her hands.

And does so both on Prada’s runways (Spring/Summer 2009), and on Vivienne Westwood’s (a celebrity collapse performed by Naomi Campbell). Fashion is business –it’s true- yet we must never forget that –before being an industry- fashion is art. And art speaks to the heart of humanity, not to their wallet.

A model falling down may be included in the category of human errors breaking the rules of austerity and seriousness: we are projected onto that runway, all of a sudden, feeling sympathetic and sharing in a reality we felt the distant spectators of minutes before. A harmless mishap, like a tumble, breaks the outfits’ "flow" –functional, for goodness’ sake- but that is very little removed from the production line of funny looking Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. And just like in that film, which marked an era, we need the tumble, the joke, the laughs to make a film on industrial production a cinema masterpiece. And a runway show a tribute of fashion to humanity.